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Shelby County |
Home 1915 History Index |
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Shelby County |
Home 1915 History Index |
CHAPTER VIII - REMINISCENCES OF THE PIONEERS
The author of this history believes that the following reminiscences of early settlers and observers will prove most interesting and instructive. We are very fortunate indeed in having with us a number of men whose recollections run back to the very early occurrences that have helped to make the history of the county. The following pages contain these reminiscences in the very words of the pioneers who have so kindly contributed them:
GEN. GREENVILLE M. DODGE, OF COUNCIL BLUFFS, IOWA.
[One of the most noted men of Iowa, who, at the age of eighty-three years, is yet vigorous in mind and body, is General Dodge, who, in 1853, made a railroad survey through Shelby county. By the way, General Dodge is one of the only surviving Union major-generals of the Civil War. The only other yet living is Gen. P. J. Osterhaus, who now resides in Germany. The railroad survey to which General Dodge refers in the following reminiscences was that of the Mississippi & Missouri Railroad, which later became known as the Rock Island.]
The maps of my original survey, which was of the Mississippi & Missouri Railroad, now the Rock Island, are on file, I suppose, in the office of the Rock Island Railroad in Chicago. If you have an early map of Iowa, made in the fifties or sixties, you will find my line marked upon it; however, if you have a sectional map of Iowa, showing the streams, I can mark the line on it passing through Shelby county. My line followed the Raccoon to the Beaver, following out the Beaver to its head into a prong of the Middle river, following it west, and crossing the divide into Troublesome. Crossing the Troublesome, it entered the eastern prong of Indian creek, following that and crossed the Indian, following out a small branch of it and across the east fork of the west Nishnabotna in township seventy-nine, crossing at the forks where Harlan now stands, going due west to near the head of the Mosquito, and thence down the Mosquito to Council Bluffs. The sectional maps issued by the Iowa railroad commission in 1892, and from then on, give the streams so clearly that it is easy to mark the course of the survey. Upon these lines the land grant was selected. About 1865, when I was in the army, the Rock Island road engineers made a survey west of Des Moines, and the chief engineer, Mr. Johnson, thought they discovered a shorter and better route by leaving the Raccoon river and following down the Turkey to Atlantic, and then crossing all the streams that I avoided, making very heavy work, and striking the Mosquito near Neola, following my line into the Bluffs. This was outside of our land grant and was a serious mistake, which the Rock Island people soon discovered, but too late to rectify it. The original plan was for the old Mississippi & Missouri Railroad to build from Davenport as near due west as possible, and the second line was to go from Muscatine due west to the Bluffs, occupying the country that the present line does from Atlantic west. This second line was built to Oskaloosa and discontinued there. The stopping of the building of the Muscatine line at Oskaloosa, the changing of the Mississippi and Missouri line down Turkey creek, immediately put in danger the land grant, which they came very near losing. It took new action by Congress for them to obtain the land grant. It was unjust to the people who had settled along my original line, as the land grant west to the Raccoon river was entirely off the line that the Rock Island built. There were a good many things happened on my first line through the state that might interest you, and I will be pleased to give them to you, part of them relating to Shelby county, and to Add Cuppy. He was the first settler in that country. I found him in what was known as Cuppy’s Grove in the fall of 1853, and there was living near him a Mr. Johnson. I came very near shooting Cuppy by accident. I knew of no settler in that country and started out ahead of my party from Indian creek to examine the country ahead. There were no maps of the country then, and as my party was out of meat, I carried my rifle for the purpose of obtaining deer if I struck one. When I struck the edge of Cuppy’s Grove, I noticed something moving in the bushes. The grove on the outside was full of hazelnut bushes, very thick and very high. I thought I saw the head of a deer in the brush, and as I was sitting on my horse, I took up my rifle to shoot it and Add Cuppy jumped up out of the brush, with a red handkerchief on his head and yelled, “not to shoot him, there was a deer in the brush and he was crawling towards it,” I mistook his red bandana as a deer, and was greatly surprised. I made his acquaintance and used him a good deal in making my reconnaissance and survey in the western part of the state, and I look upon him as a very reliable and good citizen. There were other matters relating to him that were of interest that I could relate if you need them. I entered a good deal of the land in Shelby county for myself and others—people connected with the railroad. The changing of the line south caused them to carry their lands a good many years before they were sold, and now that country, Harlan and Exira, has to be accommodated with local branches, which, if the original plan had been carried out, the railroads would have occupied the same territory, both being through lines without branches. There was another circumstance occurred at Indian creek that may interest you. Peter A. Dey, who was my chief, came out of Iowa City with a wagon and team, bringing our mail and some supplies. He expected to find me on Beaver, near the head of the Raccoon, but my survey had progressed much faster than he had expected, and when he had got over to where Indian creek was, he found it very hard to cross the stream with the wagon without help. Of course there were no roads through the country and there were no bridges. He had with him a young man who was coming to the party, by the name of Bacon, the son of the celebrated Doctor Bacon of Connecticut. When they reached Indian creek he concluded to leave the wagon and take the horses and go forward, expecting to meet me that day, but it was night when they got down to the forks of Indian creek and found where my camp had been, in the little grove in that fork. There they remained overnight. Bacon being a tenderfoot and riding his horse bareback, was pretty stiff and lame the next morning, and didn’t feel like going forward with Mr. Dey, so Mr. Dey left him with instructions to follow the staked line, or wagon track, and Mr. Dey came forward and found me located on the west Botna. I was out ahead with my party, and didn’t get back until about four o’clock in the afternoon, and Bacon hadn’t then appeared. As Mr. Dey was getting worried about him, I waited until after supper, then took a fresh horse and rode back over the country to find Bacon. I remember riding into a slough along in the evening when I came upon a pack of elk, who suddenly rose up before me and frightened me and my horse. Just after I got near to Indian creek, I struck some Indians who were coming from the south and had packs, and I afterwards understood they had been down to the settlement stealing pigs and were carrying them north. They thought I was a settler after them, and were as greatly frightened as I, and we both of us got out in a hurry. As I traveled along, at each ravine or open space I would call out at the height of my voice for Bacon, hoping he would hear me. On reaching Indian creek and not finding him, I realized that I would have to make a well defined search for him, therefore returned to my party to organize searching parties, giving definite instructions to each to follow the streams and divides, for in the open country of that kind they were as liable to be lost as Bacon. They were to remain on the stream, following it, or else on the divide. On the third day, one of the parties, under Mr. Thompson, one of the teamsters, discovered Bacon some fifteen miles would on the divide, between the Indian and Nishnabotna, staggering and almost exhausted. I, myself, had found his horse and blankets at a small stream where he appeared to have had trouble crossing. When Thompson discovered Bacon he found him dazed but still with his senses, and when Thompson told him his name, Bacon took out a watch, which Thompson had left in Iowa City for repairs, handed it to him and said, “Here is your watch,” showing he still had his senses. They all centered that night, according to my orders, at Indian creek. I immediately asked Bacon, after giving him something to eat and straightening him out, why he didn’t follow Mr. Dey’s instructions. He said he didn’t know, but he supposed he could go right across the country to the camp. I noticed one of the boys in cooking rice had burned it a little and had thrown the whole kettle out, and there it was plain to be seen in our old camp. I asked Bacon if he had seen it the day he had left there, and then had nothing to eat. He said, “Yes.” And I said, “Why didn’t you eat it?” He said, “I didn’t suppose it was fit to eat.” As a sat talking to him, I told one of the boys to take my horse down to water. His name was “Commissary.” He had been ridden by the commissary of the survey of developing our north boundary, and when Bacon heard me call the horse’s name he said, “Well, that is a good name for a horse when you are going to a starving man.” He told me where he had rested the first night, and I saw it was near where I had passed and where I had called his name, and I asked him why he had not answered me. He said, “I couldn’t think it was any human voice.” He thought it must be an animal or something, and he was afraid to answer, showing that he had no woodcraft whatever. And he also said the first two nights he was out he had dreamed of being at a table where there was any quantity of food, but he could not get any of it himself. Whilst Bacon was a graduate of Yale, and a remarkably intelligent young man, he didn’t seem to appreciate the common sense facts that a man had to have in a new country, for I lost him again in the Missouri valley. He was correspondent at that time for the New York Tribune, and wrote very interesting articles in relation to his experiences, and in after years was a noted lawyer in Rochester, New York. I think he is now dead. Some years after this, when I was making reconnaissance up the Boyer river valley, with a view of examining that country for a railroad, I had Add Cuppy with me. I forget the year, but it was the year that a hunter by the name of Bartlett or Barrett, of Council Bluffs, froze to death while out hunting. Cuppy and myself had been out, up towards the Boyer river. It was in the fall and the weather had been quite warm. We were horseback and had nothing with us; we depended upon striking settlers or some camp to get our living, and there came upon us a very heavy rain storm. As we were going down from Boyer river to Cuppy’s Grove, and within an hour or two, the rain having stopped, the weather turned extremely cold, getting down, I think, to about zero. It was so cold that it froze the ice on a little creek that we struck. I found that we could not get to Cuppy’s Grove that night and I selected a little copse of trees on a little stream—I have forgotten the name of the stream—and we tried to build a fire, but failed. I saw then that we were in great danger, because our clothing, being wet, was freezing on us, and I said to Cuppy that we must keep walking, “and if I am disposed to fall asleep you must get a willow and whip me and keep me awake, and if you do, I will do the same.” Some time after midnight, Cuppy got tired and determined to lie down, and I got the willow and whipped him. He turned on me and was going to fight me, but soon got awake enough to realize that we must keep moving. I had strength of mind enough to keep him from lying down and going to sleep. No one knows, unless he has had experience, what a desire there is under such circumstances to sleep. We passed the night with our clothes frozen, and we had to start the next morning leading our horses, as when our clothes would touch the skin it would freeze the flesh, and it was quite a long time before the weather was such that our clothes froze dry. We got to his house that evening, both of us greatly pleased and ready for a warm supper, which Mrs. Cuppy soon prepared.
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